entitlement

You have to wonder about some people's sense of entitlement.

I came to an intersection and stopped at the stop sign. A man, driving a big black pickup truck, on a street with the right of way, wanted to turn left onto the street I was on. Instead of turning his vehicle into the right hand lane, he decided he couldn't be bothered so he cut the corner and came as if to ram me. I had to back up so that he could complete his turn! The glaring was pretty fun too.

wrong word!

I received this at the office today. I needed a good laugh!


"I am re-sending this email individually because a large number of the emails I sent out as a mass mailing have bounced back with 'delivery failed' notices.


If you already received this message, I apologize for the duplicity."

Choir practice

I direct a community choir called the Ottawa Harmony Singers. They used to be called the Dutch Choral Society but decided a while back to be more inclusive. They are still all Dutch though with the exception of two members.

Tonight was our final practice before we start singing concerts in nursing homes. They sang "Iona Boat Song", which is a lovely lilting bit of Scottish music but they sang it with a strong emphasis on every beat. At the end I said, "Well, that was Germanic." Frank turned to Nellie and said, "I don't think that was a compliment!"

Later in the practice, we finished another song and I said, "That was interesting." Frank turned to Ina and said, "I think that 'interesting' is worse than 'Germanic.'"

I am so glad that they can laugh at themselves!

Church Bazaar . . . Book Table

So I was at a church bazaar, looking at their book table, when I found an interesting book. I'll admit to losing my mind for a moment. I waved the book in the air at Bev who was a ways off and said, "Look what I found ... lesbian erotica at a church bazaar!" Next thing I know, a cute young thing with short spikey hair was beetling my way with her mother in tow, "Can I have it?"

I shoulda got her number so that I can pass it on to her when I have finished it! (I think I know where she goes to church.)

None of these things is like the others

I saw a woman walking through my neighbourhood carrying a green cable-knit sweater on a hanger, a clear plastic bag with three oranges in it, and a kitchen chair. I wonder what the back story is on that.

Changing Demographics

Yesterday I was sent a video about changing demographics. It began well enough with statistics about what kind of birth rate is needed for a culture to thrive. Apparently Europeans and North Americans are not having enough babies to replace themselves.

But then it got into how the population was not falling because (gasp) there was so much Muslim immigration and that the Muslims are having 8 babies per family while the preferable white Christian folks were having less than 2. Within 25 years, Muslims will have taken over the world and this will be a very bad thing (according to the video).

My first thought was, why would anyone think that I would be interested in this kind of fear mongering? Why would they think that I would support racism?

My second thought was, what goes around comes around. Talk to the first peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Ask them what the Christians did in their "discovery" of new lands, in their conversion of the "heathen". How does this place Christians as preferable to Muslims?

Ludicrous. Definitely not funny.

Cement truck

This qualifies as ludicrous. I've been feeling a little off so I'm having a hard time finding the funny.

This morning, I was in the left lane on Carling Avenue. A cement truck came down the off ramp from the Queensway and needed to turn left at the next intersection. He had to get across three lanes of traffic during rush hour. Clever fellow that he was, not only was he using his signal lights but he had his window down and was waving and gesturing so that we could see that he needed to change not just one lane but three. I allowed a big gap to form in front of me so that he could make his lane change. He gave me a grateful wave and made his move.

A car came from behind me, zipped around me and into the lane in front of me. The cement truck was already part way into the lane and still signalling. The car tried to scoot up the lane between the truck and the curb.

I was aghast. It's not like the truck wasn't obvious with its huge bulk and its flashing lights and its placement in the lane. How could a driver miss something like this? I was amazed at how long it took for the driver to realize his error and slam on the brakes, allowing the truck to just clear his front end.

How is it that natural selection has allowed this driver to survive as long as this?

Speaking Before Thinking

Last night I was reminded of one of those times when the mouth gets in gear before the brain. This one takes a bit to set up.

Years ago, I had a student named Tom. He has a fabulous voice. I only saw him for a short period of time as he was gearing up for an audition.

Skip forward a year or two. My friend Laurel rented an apartment and called on all her friends to swarm her new place and bring it up to a reasonable standard of cleanliness before she moved in. I took charge of the stove. While I was cleaning it, Tom came in singing.

Skip forward again a few years to a community event being held on Richmond Road at Churchill Avenue. I wandered down to the event and saw Tom outside the old Nepean Town Hall singing with a quartet. They were wonderful.

When they took a break, I walked up to greet Tom. The first words out of my mouth weren't "Hey how are you!" or "How great to see you again." Nope. They were "Wow, the last time I heard that voice I had my head in an oven."

Apparently, that was funny. Enough so that Laurel, who hadn't even been there, had heard it and brought it up in conversation yesterday evening.

Bake Table

And on another page in the proof copy: "Jams and jellies will also be on sale, as well as a bake table."

Personally, I'd rather have the cookies than the table!

St John

In one of my lives, I proof read a monthly newspaper. In the upcoming edition, I found this wonderful sentence which I'm sure it's a darn pity that I caught. "The Bishop has given his permission for St. John the Evangelist to begin offering a rite of blessing for same-sex couples who have been civilly married and where at least one party is baptized."

Our Bishop must be something else! Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead but our Bishop can raise St. John the Evangelist AND give him his marching orders.

Undies

Today, Bev and I went to the bazaar at All Saints' Westboro. It was a happy time of meeting folks that we were close to when we attended All Saints'. We decided to have lunch at the bazaar. If you are only a few people, you get seated at a table wherever there is room and not necessarily with people that you know.

We were seated with Sally. Sally and I went to public school together and we were never more than acquaintances, each having our own crowd. She was accompanied by her husband Mike. I noted his last name and asked if he was the Mike that had gone to Fisher Park High School a few grades ahead of me and indeed it was him.

Throwing all caution to the wind, I told him that I had one clear memory of him and it was of him in his underwear. He was startled and couldn't think when that might have happened. Sally was laughing and demanded to hear the story.

Mike and I were both choristers in the high school choir, the Cantabile Singers. In the summer of 1974, the choir and the band embarked on Project LAMP (London Amsterdam Music Project). In London (England of course) we stayed at a frightful dive called the Pembridge Palace Hotel. The washrooms in the hotel were all located at half levels off the landings in the stairwell.

I was having trouble sleeping one night and wishing to not awaken my roommates, I took my book out into the hallway and sat on the stairs to read. I had been there only a short time when Mike emerged from one of the bathrooms wearing only the aforementioned underwear. He must have thought that there would be no one else about at that hour. He strode very confidently past me, greeting me as he went.

That memory has stayed with me. His very fine physique, his confident manner, and the utter unexpectedness of the situation.

It was lovely to sit and have lunch with him today and to discover that his personality is just as attractive now as his 18-year-old body was then.

Peanut Butter

I went over to have lunch with my Mom after my morning job today. When I arrived, she was desperately scraping inside an extremely empty jar of peanut butter, trying to get enough fragments gathered to make a sandwich out of. There was a new jar in the cupboard.

I know that my parents are children of the depression and of WWII rationing but surely there is a limit?

My Mom and I had fun conniving against my Dad. I washed out the empty jar thoroughly so that he wouldn't be tempted to retrieve it from the blue box.

And of such moments are happy little memories made.

NIMBY

Today I faced down a NIMBY. Lord those people irritate me! This one bought up housing stock in a low income neighbourhood, turned it into lah-de-dah condos and then complains that the neighbours are dragging down the value of their property.

I'm still trying to find the funny in this. Maybe it was how I went all sweetness and light to show up how dark and disgusting she was? You should see me do sweetness and light. I'm not very dark at the worst of times so it was appallingly saccharine. I don't know if I turned her from her evil ways but at least I amused myself.

Anglicanorum Coetibus

This morning I was reading Anglicanorum Coetibus (the latest from the Vatican on disaffected Anglicans) at the breakfast table. That may have been a mistake.

The first page confirmed in my mind how silly  the pronouncements from old men wearing dresses and red slippers can be. In a nutshell, the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church. There may be other things out there that call themselves churches but they are misguided. They do recognize that there are expressions of sanctification and truth beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church but that these expressions "properly belong" to the Roman Catholic Church.

Really.

I would have thought that they belong to God but clearly, the Roman Catholic hierarchy feels that they are above God and can tell God what is what. Somehow that's not funny.

The funny part was  in the discussion of how they would be putting together the Anglican Ordinariates. They could have chosen the word "make". They could have chosen "create". Nope. They chose to "erect" the ordinariates, each within a particular Conference of Bishops. That's going to be a lot of erections!

What proof?

Wait, there was something funny yesterday.

I have a policy about treating shop clerks as human beings. I try to put a real smile  on their faces instead of the standard issue smiles. If I can, I make them laugh. Having been a shop clerk in a previous existence, I know how important that can be to counteract all the nasty, self-absorbed shoppers.

Two years ago I got rid of my winter coats, both the short and the long. They had seen far far better days. Last winter I couldn't afford to buy two coats so I shivered and complained a lot in the short coat that I could afford.

Yesterday I decided that I wasn't going to go through that again so I went shopping for a coat. I tried on several and had settled on a beautiful chocolate brown coat that fit very nicely. The sales woman started trying to sell me on the coat. The fabric was designed by NASA for extreme cold. I wouldn't need to layer underneath it. The fabric has a lifetime warrantee and is stain proof, rip proof, wind proof, weather proof ... I interrupted her, "Is it bullet proof?" Big silence then lots of laughter from both of the sales women.

Mission accomplished.

I bought the coat.

Blog #1

What should I write about for this momentous first blog? I've always found it important to have a sense of humour, even when times get strange. Or especially when times get strange.

My laughter is often triggered by bad writing. When I was a fresh young thing, just out of university, I took a job in a coffee shop in a mall. A memo from mall management was circulated to all the businesses requiring that boxes in the storerooms must be stacked to within six feet of the emergency sprinklers. That made no sense to me so the next time that I saw the mall manager, I asked him to clarify as certainly my store didn't have enough boxes to get within six feet of the sprinkler and besides, wouldn't you want a clear zone so that the water could spread and not restricted? He looked down his nose at me and insisted that what he had written clearly indicated the creation of that zone. The man standing next to him cleared his throat and said, "Well actually, Jim, she's right."

For me, it was a hilarious moment. This was in 1981 when women still were not considered the equals of men (and I don't think we've gotten there yet), and especially not young women. I was impressed by the courage of the second man to speak up and agree with the "lesser than". It was delightful to see the pompous ass have the wind taken out of his sails.

What it did though was teach me to really read what was before me. I have gotten more laughs out of bad writing than I have out of purportedly funny writing.

There is another side of me.

As a good Anglican church lady it is often thought that I wouldn't say s*** if my mouth was full of it and I do go with that image. It makes it that much more funny when I pull out a joke about sheep and certain kilt-wearing men.

But what was funny today? Not too much. Remembrance Day doesn't often lead to hilarity. Today was a day for solemn thoughts and hopes for peace. Tomorrow will be a laughing day.